Is philosophy part of cognitive science? It would be rather dubious to claim it is part of biology, or part of physics, or a part of psychology, although all of those sciences were part of philosophy, at some point in their development. Now there is place for philosophy of biology, philosophy of physics, and philosophy of psychology, amidst others. Is the now celebrated union between philosophy and cognitive science going to know the same fate: cognitive science on the one hand, and philosophy of cognitive science on the other? I guess that, if most of Stich's claims are justifies, the answer should be: no.

Stich has been working on this topic for more than thirty years. The first volume of his Collected Papers is a chance to take a fresh retrospective look at one of the most stimulating (as much as controversial) works in the field. Actually, this is not material for beginners. Scholars and graduates working or interested in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, cognitive science and related disciplines or sub-disciplines (like neuroscience, history of psychiatry, and mental health) are definitely the intended audience. This volume is composed of seventeen papers ranging from 1972 to 2010, some of them being already classics, and of a very useful introduction, where Stich is reading backwards his path from philosophy of mind to what fully counts today as a part of cognitive science: experimental philosophy, colloquially known as "X-Phi ". The collection includes two seminal papers for this movement (chapters 16 and 17).

Stich relies on the heavy burden of evidence accumulated by researchers in cognitive science to challenge traditional philosophy. He is not only interested in providing new philosophical theories based on empirical research. Indeed, cognitive science is raising fundamental questions about the scope and limits of traditional philosophy. The upshot is that empirical findings are liable to defeat the major assumptions of traditional philosophy, and the traditional shape of debates around this corner.

For example, in the well-known debate on the reality of mental states posited by any mentalist lexicon (especially Folk-Psychology lexicon), Stich does not rely on any a priori argument to take sides in this matter.

It is really interesting to see how his view of Folk-Psychology evolved through the years. And, as it happens, this evolution is the core of this collection, (with seven papers covering this topic). We may briefly summarize this evolution, as follows.

Stich first defended a sort of standard eliminativism (i.e. the claim to the effect that mental vocabulary is purely fictional, and has no scientific value), in Stich 1983, and departed progressively from this view. The first reasons of this turn are made explicit in the first chapter of Stich 1996, which is not part of this collection. Roughly, the eliminativist argument does not work, for it fails to elaborate clearly the reference of mental terms: this dismissal of arguments from reference is clearly developed in the chapters 12 and 17 of this collection.

After this turn, Stich began to leave the paths of standard philosophy of mind, relying heavily on models provided by cognitive psychology. He then proposed, with William Ramsey and Joseph Garon an argument against folk-psychological theories of mindedness, which takes the form of a conditional: if connectionists models are true, then folk-psychology, which is based on discrete meaningful and causally relevant entities should be abandoned (chapter 6, which is taken from Stich 1996). The lessons of connectionism may be drawn toward a new account of nativism: this is the purpose of the chapter 6.

Maybe the insight from connectionism does not allow to push far enough the enterprise of qualifying folk explanations of behavior. Stich decided then that, as folk-psychology is something which is readily used in social expertise, that is the task of interpreting publicly observable behaviors, so as to know what people around us think, want, the way they feel, and so on (this activity may be properly termed as " mindreading "), it was time for this debate to take into account the fact that cognitive psychology has a lot to say about this. Stich and Nichols wrote a book (Stich & Nichols 2003) where they take sides in the debate between Simulation Theory (i.e. our social expertise is not conditioned by the possession of informational content explicitly represented in the mind, as Theory theorists think, but rather the result of an internal process of simulating the behavior, playing with acquired representations) and the Tacit Theory-Theory (i.e. our social expertise is the contextual development of a theory of mind which is explicitly represented in the mind) : they defended a mixed account : some aspects of mindreading are based on simulation, while the other aspects are made possible by rich-informational contents of a tacit theory.

Stich was first convinced that the simulation theory was false (see chapter 9). Nowadays, in the essays presented as chapter 11 and 15 of this collection, Stich and his colleagues rely on the mixed theory, and the target is, clearly, functionalism (which was one of the early Stich's targets : see chapter 5, about Dennett and intentional systems).

Nowadays, as Stich points out, "...there were obvious limits imposed by the facts that philosophers were consumers of empirical findings that others had reported. For our colleagues in other departments have their own priorities [...]. Frustrated by the fact that we could not persuade our busy psychologist colleagues to do the studies we wanted them to do, Shaun Nichols, Jonathan Weinberg, and I, decided we would do them ourselves " (xv). Discontented with the limits of "empirical philosophy", they decided to do "experimental philosophy" (this distinction is clearly drawn by Jesse Prinz: see "Empirical Philosophy and Experimental Philosophy" in Knobe & Nichols 2008, 189-208)

It is quite obvious that the fate of X-Phi is closely related to the developments of Evolutionary Analysis of Behavior, and, especially, Evolutionary Psychology. For it is reasonable to collect intuitions as data allowing a description of psychological mechanisms which are causing our epistemic, moral, metaphysical intuitions (traditional philosophers select some intuitions and take them at cash value, claiming that they are the "natural" and "normal " intuitions any rational subject must share, hence the project of deconstructing this trust with philosophical experiments, see chapters 16 and 17), using statistical methods, only if one is able to account statistically for the effectiveness of those very psychological mechanisms : Evolutionary Psychology obviously qualifies for this.

Actually, experimental philosophers do share the prospects and styles of explanation of Evolutionary Psychology (see, for example, the papers devoted to the defense and clarification of evolutionary psychology by two leading experimental philosophers: Machery & Cohen 2011)

In the paper presented in chapters 13, Stich and Mallon try to show that Evolutionary Psychology and Social Constructivism are compatible, for they do not speak at/of the same level. They take the example of emotions. So, disputing about whether emotions, for example, are social constructs or the effect of biologically innate modular mechanisms is pointless. For it is quite possible to study emotions as taking place in social interactions without precluding a study of emotions as prototypes which may or may not be developed depending on the context.

In the paper presented in the chapter 14, and provocatively entitled "Darwin in the MadHouse", Stich and Murphy argue that Evolutionary Psychology should serve the task of providing a scientifically based taxonomy of mental disorders, which could advantageously replace the DSM. It should help us, too, to get a reach on "a principled way of drawing the distinction between mental disorders and patterns of antisocial behavior produced by people whose evolved minds are beset by no problems at all" (p.296).

I will conclude by underlining, as Stich himself does, at the end of his introduction, how Stich's major methodological contribution to philosophical methodology is to encourage philosophers to work together, to collaborate. One should not lose of sight the fact that "nine other authors have contributed to one or more of these papers" (p.xxi).

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